Social Marketing Platform Spredfast Acquires Shoutlet

The social management providers are considered among the strongest in the field. Combined company will have more than 1,400 clients.

Spredfast and Shoutlet, two of the leading companies in the social media management software industry, are joining forces. Austin-based Spredfast announced today that it is acquiring its Madison, Wisconsin-based competitor.

The combined company will have more than 1,400 clients, including all five major broadcast television networks and half of Interbrand’s top 100 global brands, and will slightly narrow the crowded field of social management platforms.

That’s good news, said Nate Elliott, a principal analyst with Forrester Research. “Marketers would welcome any consolidation in a category as cluttered as this one,” Elliott said in an email to Marketing Land. “Plus, Spredfast and Shoutlet are two of the strongest players in the field. If Spredfast manages this process well, this move should only make them stronger.”

Spredfast and Shoutlet were each given high marks in Forrester’s most recent rankings of social relationship platforms. Spredfast was named a market “leader” with Percolate and Sprinklr. Shoutlet was tabbed the best all-round tool of the second tier of “strong performers,” a category that also included Expion, Hootsuite and Falcon Social.

Spredfast and Shoutlet are an especially good fit, said Spredfast president and CEO Rod Favaron, because each company has built its platform to integrate well with other digital marketing tools. The list of tech partners on the Spredfast site is long — including Brandwatch, Kenshoo, Crimson Hexagon, Google Analytics, Opal, Symantec, Salesforce, Synthesio and Sysomos, many of whom also have relationships with Shoutlet.

Openness is a key to Spredfast’s strategy, and it’s what differentiates it from competitors who offer more closed-ended tools, Favaron said.

“We have much more of a collaborative, open best-of-breed culture and strategy than most companies,” he said in a telephone interview. “I think that’s very unique in this market.”

Favaron continued: “We think 2016 and 2017 are really the years when social goes from being a standalone set of tools that a business buys to a set of enterprise products that integrate with all of their other enterprise products.”

The merged company will maintain both platforms for the time being, integrating tools from each. Shoutlet, which has nearly 500 clients, including Best Buy, Four Seasons and Lowe’s, has a strong CRM component that links social data with customer management platforms such as Salesforce. Spredfast recently launched an updated social intelligence and listening tool. Spredfast is also a preferred partner with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Tumblr, LinkedIn and Pinterest and last year merged with Mass Relevance, another Austin-based social marketing firm.

Terms of the deal between the private companies were not announced. Spredfast will absorb Shoutlet’s executive team and about 100 employees in the Madison office, pushing the Spredfast employee roster to about 600 people. Shoutlet president and co-founder Aaron Everson will become the general manager of Shoutlet.